The History of the Bikini
June 20, 2013
THE witty swimsuit retailer Jessica Rey does a nice job of describing the history of the bikini and explaining why immodesty is degrading, not liberating. Rey’s swimsuits are attractive though I wouldn’t call them modest, except by today’s aggressively revealing standards.
—- Comments —
Fred Owens writes:
I was at the beach yesterday in glorious Southern California, playing in the surf, relaxing on the sand and watching nearly-naked women walking down the strand. Honestly, I brought a good book with me and I tried not to notice.
I follow a much stricter policy when I am at the beach with my girl friend. There is no possibility of surreptitious glances going un-noticed. Instead, I resolutely look up at the sky, or out at the waves, or at my feet. She appreciates that.
It might help if the younger ones were more modestly dressed, but it wouldn’t help that much. They could be covered head to toe in a shape-concealing burka, lustful images would still dance in my head. And the funny thing is that I expected, at my ripe old age, to not be bothered by this kind of stimulation, but my fascination with the female figure continues.
Yes, they should cover up more, especially the younger ones, but I don’t think girl-watching is going out of business under any regime.
Diana writes:
Wow, those are lovely suits! I would agree that they aren’t necessarily to my own modesty standards, but I think it depends partly on one’s body type. Also, the standards of modesty are so different now even from when I was a teenager. I remember seeing many young women wearing one-pieces when I was a child, but now it seems that even bikinis that cover all the necessary parts are considered “boring” and not attractive enough because they don’t allow the young woman to be as close to naked as humanly possible. One of my cousins who is in high school was recently teased mercilessly at a school pool party for wearing a tankini (the other students called it “lame” and asked her why she wasn’t showing her stomach and if she had something to hide), a suit which my mother would have never allowed me to wear! So I’d say this is a definite step in the right direction. Also, they are beautifully designed.
Debra C. writes:
As you may know, I live in southern Arizona; and I have a backyard pool. I don swimwear only within the confines of my very private backyard. But much of the time I use the pool when grandchildren and their parents are around. And I am very modest — as I have taught my two daughters and youngest granddaughter to be. (The fifteen-year-old blond beauty granddaughter is scarred for life, emotionally, because her mother sent her off to summer camp two years ago wearing full-coverage swimwear: quelle horreur!)
At any rate, even given that I swim (play in the pool) in complete privacy, I wear either swim shorts or skirt over my suit or a tie-at-the-hips skirt, extending to mid thigh. That being said, I would readily buy the Marie or the Susy.
Thank you for delivering — to this reader — such relevant content.
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
I might have some appreciable insight into this phenomenon, not exactly because I have studied it deliberately, but rather because I was exposed – and probably overexposed – to it whether I wanted to be or not. When I was twelve years old in 1966 my father, a captain (soon thereafter a chief) on the Los Angeles Fire Department, moved us from Highland Park, an old suburb of Los Angeles, to the remoteness of Point Dume in Malibu, a rural, sparsely populated area so far from any amenity that the nearest grocery store was twenty miles away in Pacific Palisades and to dial out of the local five-number area, one had to go through an operator. (The reason for the move: Highland Park was deteriorating socially and land in farther Malibu was cheap, believe it or not.) All that notwithstanding, Point Dume meant the beach, particularly Big Dume beach and Zuma beach, overlooked by Malibu Park Junior High School, where I attended seventh grade in the fall of ’66. The places and dates are significant because insoafar as anywhere was the heart of Bikinidom it would have been the Malibu beaches in the mid-1960s.
Drawing on clinical research Jessica Rey makes the point, affirmed by intuition long before it was validated by the experimental method, that nudity in women shuts down the cognitive and moral functions of the male brain; men, confronted by scantily clad females, almost immediately begin addressing those females as things rather than persons. I agree with Rey that this clinical finding makes hash of the feminist claim that bikinis, or slutty dress, or anything else meretricious “empowers” women.
What Rey omits to consider, which must be equally important, is what cognitive and moral effects the donning of the bikini has on girls. I have a theory about this, which I draw from an adolescence, much of which was spent at Big Dume, Westward, and Zuma beaches in the mid- to late-1960s. I will jump to my conclusion and give the argument afterwards. Scanty dress turns adolescent girls, who are already prone to be rigidly character-armored, supercilious, clique-prone, and snippy into raging super-bitches whose primary emotional satisfaction comes from preemptively teasing and humiliating boys. The girls to whom I refer were not entirely blameworthy; they were just empty-headed and suggestible. They must have been driven into their behavior largely by peer-pressure and images from popular cultures (“Beach” movies and rock-and-roll) and having all but denuded themselves they were very probably, like the girl in “Itsy Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” scared out of their wits by their self-made situation. So their bitchy attitude was defensive. Rendering themselves vulnerable, they suddenly had to ward off what they thought was going to be flattering (the riveted sexual attention of males) but which turned out to be terrifying. They had to shut down their own erotic responses to boys.
Persistent behavior becomes habit or second nature. The emotional hardening that began on the beach in scanty followed many girls whom I knew into their twenties and beyond into their adult lives.
Laura writes:
You say, “So their bitchy attitude was defensive.” Perhaps, but over-confidence, an awareness of one’s primal power over others, is probably at work in many cases. A bikini is an act of aggression in its own way. I realize many girls don’t mean it that way.
Persistent behavior becomes habit or second nature. The emotional hardening that began on the beach in scanty followed many girls whom I knew into their twenties and beyond into their adult lives.
True. Immodesty makes women mean and callous.
Terry Morris writes:
Interesting post. Mr. Owens’s comments brought a smile to my face. As I’ve been under the weather the last several days, I thank him for that. I share his admiration for the female form.
Also, his comments brought to mind a discussion between me and one of my brothers and our father a few years ago when my brother and I were visiting Dad at his home. I don’t recall what prompted it (probably a TV commercial featuring a half-naked woman or something), but the conversation turned to the revealing way women (particularly young women) dress these days. My father and I agreed that modestly dressed women are more attractive to us in general than their opposites. One of us remarked that what is left to the imagination is, for us at least, much more appealing than, say, a woman who dresses herself leaving very little to the imagination.
My brother quickly, and strongly, disagreed. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. But seriously, once upon a time during the first year of our marriage Annette and I were at my family’s reunion at an Oklahoma lake. Annette was clad in a skimpy (for the time – nothing like what you see nowadays) bikini, and one of my half-drunk cousins said something to me about how sexy she looked. When I objected to his noticing, he basically retorted that maybe I should think about covering her up more then; that she, half-dressed the way she was, in her prime and naturally beautiful, was hard for him and others not to notice. The point was very well taken, and we didn’t have that problem anymore. When I helped her pick the bikini out it never occured to me as anymore than just a fleeting thought that all of the other men there would like what they saw too. But I’ve always been a pretty quick learner, and that particular incident was no exception. :-)
Mary writes:
A couple of summers ago we went to a beach to see fireworks on the 4th of July. I’m the mother of teen boys and was on “immodesty high alert” – I had already directed my boys to the bikini-free zone (before anyone feels sorry for them know that they are embarrassed by bikinis). I sat with the adults and I remember observing two groups of teenage girls, I’ll call them the bikini squad and the tankini squad. I was surprised at how naked the bikini girls looked compared to the tankini girls. Also, the completely bare midsection/exposed belly button (Rey mentions this) seemed to make a big difference in how the girls behaved. The bikini squad was self-conscious and preoccupied, constantly making tiny adjustments to their suits to make sure they were covered (as much as was possible), striking poses, etc. The tankini girls were relaxed and laughing and talking and not self-conscious. I realize this is anecdotal but I found it interesting just the same.
I think bitchy is becoming the new nice. I drove behind a woman the other day who had “Miss Bitch” emblazoned in six inch high letters across her back windshield from one side to the other. I know it’s hard to believe but I think she put it there herself. America can only watch so much reality TV. Lex video, lex agere. Or something. :-)
Mr. Bertonneau writes:
The most important sentence in my four paragraphs is this one: “They [the girls] had to shut down their own erotic responses to boys.” Denudation did not, as promised, lead to a return of Eden or liberation into a “beyond good and evil” of sexual pleasure. It stultified sexuality, by divorcing it from emotions and ideas and reducing it to a purely physical act. The boys were mentally deadened and the girls were sexually deadened. Everyone was driven further into pathological narcissism.
Thinking things over – I believe that the murder of eros under the name of sexual liberation (bikinis and everything else) is the cause of much of the apathy that characterizes contemporary college students. Eros, said Socrates, drove intellectual curiosity just as much as it drove procreation. De-eroticized students can muster no interest in knowledge; they lack curiosity, and they almost never ask meaningful questions.
Laura writes:
Thank you for your excellent analysis.
Allan Bloom made the same point about the de-eroticized student in The Closing of the American Mind.
Marissa writes:
First, I want to thank you for your invaluable blog. Your words and that of your readers provides a lot of encouragement for me as I navigate the sometimes turbulent waters of wife- and motherhood. Nothing in my life ever prepared me for this, and it’s so easy to become discouraged when one has absolutely no experience with babies or running a household. Even if you don’t speak specifically on anything I have to face in my daily life, just the fact that you speak about motherhood and tradition as something normal and sensible helps very much. I have been unable to donate any money to you for a while, but I was glad to be able to do so a couple nights ago.
On the topic of swimwear, I used to go to the public pool on a near daily basis as a child, and I always noticed that it was the girls in bikinis who were uncomfortable with themselves, as Mary noted. The girls in the one-pieces were the ones usually having fun in the water, while the boys always stared at the bikini girls and seemed to harass them. I didn’t understand why boys would stare at girls so much at the time, but something in me became determined never to put myself on display to be stared at or harassed in such a manner.
Later on, I became aware of the effects of nearly naked flesh on boys, and I always thought it manipulative and unfair that girls and women would take advantage of men and boys like that, and then complain about it. Additionally, I had an arrogant attitude that no one was going to look at me unless they earned the right to, so I kept myself covered; my “uniform” until my mid-20s was always loosely-fitting jeans and t-shirt. I even swam in such a getup! Yes, it was heavy! Now that I acknowledge my femininity, I wear prettier things such as blouses and skirts, but swimwear stumped me for quite a while. My search was made more difficult by the fact that I am a little bit on the heavier side, and most of the modest options I found just didn’t go up to my size. I thought I would end up having to buy a rash guard and long surf shorts, which is what my husband wears.
A couple of years ago, my husband stumbled on a site with decent looking swimwear and summer clothing options. Coolibar sells clothes aimed at protecting one’s skin from the effects of the sun. They are more expensive than what I’d like to pay for clothes but sometimes one just doesn’t have a choice. I love their ruched swim shirt and swim pants, which my husband purchased two years ago for a two-week camping trip during what turned out to be a terrible heat wave. The fabric has an SPF of 50, which means I never needed sunscreen, and the fabric is also extremely cooling as long as it is moist and you have some air moving around you. I carry a lacy hand fan for when the breeze died.
We went to a theme park nearly daily, walking around in over 100 degree heat, but as long as I visited a water ride or even just poured a bit of water on me now and then, I felt as if I were sitting in an air-conditioned room. I ended up wearing the set almost every day that trip, washing it by hand every night. Living in a swampy area as I do, I know the last thing you want to do when it’s hot is leave your skin exposed to the sun, or wear non-breathing clothes. You should dress smart, not less. To me, finding a set of modest swim clothes is “a win” all around. Best of all for me is if I’m ogled by men, they must use a lot more imagination than they ordinarily would for a woman in swim clothes.
